Introduction to Javascript and Ajax: Building Web Apps

Overview

Do you realize that the only functionality of a web application that the user directly interacts with is through the web page? Implement it poorly and, to the user, the server-side becomes irrelevant! Today’s user expects a lot out of the web page: it has to load fast, expose the desired service, and be comfortable to view on all devices: from a desktop computers to tablets and mobile phones. The course covers fundamental Javascript programming concepts, starting with variables, data types, operators, and control flow mechanisms. It will then teach learners about object-oriented programming in Javascript, object creation using literals and constructors, prototypes, and the intricacies of the 'this' keyword. After which, the course goes into the power of Javascript arrays, using namespaces and IIFEs to prevent variable collisions, and discussion of closures and their use cases in Javascript programming. After covering the fundamental Javascript programming concepts, the course transitions into building dynamic and interactive websites by using Javascript and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) to interact with the Document Object Model (DOM), handle user events, and dynamically update web page content. The course will also talk about the HTTP protocol, different HTTP request methods, and how to work with JSON data. Building on these skills, learners will gain practical, hands-on experience by converting the restaurant website into a dynamic single-page application (SPA) powered by Javascript and AJAX.

Syllabus

Introduction to Javascript

What fun would a web site be if there was no functionality to it? In this course, we are going to concentrate on learning the fundamentals of the Javascript language. A lot of even seasoned developers “tinker” with Javascript without really understanding how the language works. That leads to viewing the language as more of a nuisance instead of a powerful tool. That is why we are going to concentrate not only on the “how” but also on the “why”, so you are empowered by the Javascript language features, not confused by them. We’ll cover just about everything - from common language constructs and Javascript types to objects, functions, arrays, closures, and scope isolation.

Using Javascript to Build Web Applications

In this course, we are going to take all those newly learned Javascript language skills and learn how to utilize them within the context of a web page. We’ll start by learning how to properly manipulate the web page components using the Javascript Document Object Model API. We will then move on to learning one of the most popular ways of serving up data to a web site - Ajax. We'll learn about the protocol that the language of the web speaks in (HTTP), how to set up and handle Ajax requests and responses, as well as how to process JSON data. We'll finish the course by connecting our restaurant web site from Course 3 (Coding the Static Restaurant Site) to a real backend service that will allow us to pull the data for the restaurant menu dynamically from the server without having to reload the entire page.